NASA

Apart from the base funding that is being provided to ADL from NASA as part of DLI, NASA is also providing support for Dr. Linda Hill to work for the project during the period November 1996-October 1997. Under the current agreement, NASA is providing approximately half of Dr. Hill's salary, while the Project and the University Librarian, Dr. Joe Boisse, are providing the remainder. Apart from holding a PhD in the area of library science, Dr. Hill is an expert in the area of metadata for spatial digital collections, and served as the library liaison for the Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS) Subgroup of the Data Management Working Group of GCDIS.

An important function of Dr. Hill's position from the perspective of NASA is to provide a link between the GCDIS, ADL, and the five other DLI projects. In particular, the position is intended to attain the following objectives:

1. to develop a Gazetteer Content Standard. In relation to this goal, GCDIS and the participating agencies will be involved in the review and testing of the proposed content standard for gazetteer information and in the proposal to develop a web-based entry system to support the contribution of new gazetteer information. This content standard will support the GCDIS objective of encouraging interoperability among the federal data nodes by providing a consistent representation of international geographic names and their footprints on the surface of the Earth. A proposed standard will be distributed in early 1997 to the GCDIS Subgroup for review and evaluation. Furthermore, Dr. Hill is investigating ways in which to improve the feature class/type hierarchy now in place for the ADL gazetteer. It is planned to extend this hierarchy into a thesaurus format to be supported in ADL by thesaurus software. Both catalogers and searchers will then be able to browse the feature thesaurus for available terminology for either description or retrieval.

2. to research various issues relating to terminology tools such as thesauri and concept spaces. This set of activities involves ADL's research project with the Universities of Illinois and Arizona to develop a concept space in the field of earth science using as a core a large set of records from two indexing and abstracting services. A concept space relates terms to one another on the basis of the frequency with which they appear together in the same documents. The resulting terminology database can be used by users to discover related terminology for their searches. Beyond text, the investigation will involve the application of the concept space approach to images, where a given image icon (segment of an image) is related to other image icons. Concept space results will be made available for beta testing to GCDIS participants.